needn’t be rehashed here about sodomy as that unnameable sin that goes against some natural order—but there is that too. More recently as well, estradial, for a time, was derived from mare urine. There is something of this to the work.

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To speak to motivation though, why non-human animals might become metaphors or metonymic, something by which to interpret other things, is difficult. I suppose there is, at bottom, the simple fact of wanting to write about bees and horses and so on because, of the things which make up the world available to me, I enjoy writing about them more than other things. It’s why hope is in the book too.  To hope, still, in the face of things feeld addresses, is, perhaps, cruel. But despite that, I would still like to believe in a world where it’s not such a cruel thing. That world is not this world, but I believe it is still worth imagining. Likewise, I would like to believe a bee could fly by and be wholly present, in its time, its bee-like time, and I in mine, my I-like time, and it could land or fly away or sting—and that would be the end of it. That is also not this world though; it is also worth imagining.

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I’m really interested in what I see as some sort of balance between precision and overflow--the language is formal and austere while at the same time each word contains multiple meanings and ideas. In a similar sense, certainty and uncertainty seem to circle one another. Could you tell us a bit about how these dualities work with and against each other?

 

The poems that I have carried with me through life are not poems which communicate things; they are not strictly comprehensible. They are not, however, strictly incomprehensible either. I don’t know what black milk is, but I know the rhythm of Todesfuge—I see it daily in this world; I don’t know what the bean-eaters remember and remember, but not a week goes by, since I read Brooks, I don’t ponder it. They are unknown, uncertain things—yet they function, become useful, in the most certain of ways. I think we know this of art, television, comedy, friendship. It is a harder lesson with poetry, at times—all the pretense toward understanding of words, and English words. But when we need the embrace of a dear friend we know not any embrace from anyone will do.

 

Or, today, when the sun sat over the port where I live, I thought of Alma Thomas—that, in this case, blue sun—it was there, before me, I saw it—and if she never set, stroke after stroke, a whole eclipse of blue, to canvas, I would not have been able to see that sun. I would be lost to another, less beautiful certainly, but I think less actual perception of the actual sun. Things open up in that comparison, in that tension—all the ways the two may interpret each the other—the new blue paint of a now for rent building downtown once featuring a portrait of Amiri Baraka; a date at MOLAA discussing mosaic (has it been over a year?), mid-day, the last person to hold my hand publicly, light on sculpture; the mural above the park, broken oranges and yellows forming so-Alma-like a sun, whose benches and lemon trees were removed last year, repaved, displacement of those without fixed addresses who resided there: that whole process of metaphor in the broadest sense.

 

I feel indebted, I am indebted, to these—they have formed my thoughts, perceptions, how I speak, how I am in the world. The poetry that I care most about does this for me as, for others, naturally, other poems, artists, friends, media, and so on, does for them. I carry my own poems with me, like this, too (though less close, less informed). I hope they may provide others likewise what certainty and uncertainty they have provided me, not as universally comprehensible by any one reader, but a stage by which to open relations and thought, that they provide some of that grace—which is not mine, which was Celan’s, Thomas’, Brooks’, countless others who informed and labored—to a reader or two. Because poetry has its uses (yes, but too always for who, by whom).

 

Speaking of dualities, there seem to be tensions between embodiment and surveillance, or between individual agency and apparatus of power through the poems. I’m thinking of the lines:

 

“Thees treees / cannot be insied me/ not with all thees copse around” (Vi); It is horribel / off corse/ to be / tangibel / inside kapital (IX); “i was your perfect lil imperialist / wite aesteet inn amonge the crop off nowe / Gendre / a holie pirsentile / dessicating uprite & / terrortorialie / but owed” (XI);  the nayme script & the state scrypt (XVI).

 

How did the thematic duality of autonomy and control inform or shape the process of writing the poems and organizing the manuscript, or inversely do you see the poems are speaking back to these society forces?

 

I’m hesitant to commit to the poem as “speaking back” as, one, it seems unlikely feeld will be circulated by the state or many cops—I think it’s neither that nationally welcoming nor that dangerous—and two, as with the answer above, the lyric of the poem, that use, is the end, for me, of the poem. That a poem may also be dangerous, useful to political projects (good and bad), useless to them, and so on, strikes me as important but incidental to the fact of its use as such (or, politics more generally). As far as those lines in particular, I was thinking on, among other things, how—especially in Tucson—moving about in a city as a trans woman meant consistent harassment by cops (one is often assumed a sex worker which, in a context where often the only work available is sex work, forecloses certain spaces wholesale). Thus the flaneur figure—that city-wandering and observational tone of a lot of the work—needed this clarification, I felt. There’s also though that pun on “copse,” a “forest through the trees” joke, that the external whole of copse forecloses the internal part of tree. But, above all, the corpse—how between the copse and cops the corpse lingers. And what else haunts a trans flaneur but a corpse. This is all my analysis though as a reader, my memory in writing it—there are of course other readings, and better ones, I’m sure.

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How do you approach different forms and the use of white space? Did you exercise a certain methodology with the use of roman numerals?

 

I wanted the poems in feeld to reference, visually, other poetic styles more than adopt their forms per se. Certain poems took a visual form similar to Olson’s Maximus Poems or Zukovsky when, for instance and generally, the poems were critical of poetry’s relation to “place,” or rather US nationalist projects as abstracted to “place”; or, a Dickinsonian sparseness when more intimate. I very much consider these poems more landscape than portraiture though—so the organization of materials, visually, in that sense is a balancing act of effect and more typical poetic practicality (line length, breaks, readability, etc). The slashes are one more element of this, allowing for prosaic references to emerge too depending on what is needed. There’s no real formal scheme but there certainly are tendencies—using that externalized, block-like homogeny, like Pound might have, in order, precisely, to break it.

 

As a medievalist I’m really drawn to and excited by what seems to me like a linguistic interrogation of origin and genesis, language retrieval as a kind of revelation of truth through a process of naming. I am thinking of the lines “i am oldre/ &the sayme / than the naymes u gave” and how the words “ewe”, “mare”, “tran”, and “feeld”, seem to circle around the line visually in a ‘corse’ (III). Were there particular texts in your scholastic work that were particularly initiatory for the manuscript? Were there medieval authors, thinkers, and texts you felt in conversation with throughout the project?
 

I’ve been fearful to overstate feeld’s late-medieval and early modern connections as they can be overdeterminative for some readers (rather than a book of poems employing respelling as one technique among others, it becomes a book whose limit is exhausted by respelling). Authors like Harryette Mullen, bill bissett, Cathy Park Hong, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski were more initiatory, for me, than say Langland, the Pearl-Poet, Spenser (though, these were too). As I began working on the project I did read more and more early work—particularly Old English texts like the metrical charms (which I was translating alongside writing feeld), riddles, elegies. The poem which opens the manuscript has more than a few similarities to The Wife’s Complaint; Julian of Norwich shows up in a couple poems, Augustine’s Confessions, Christine de Pizan, the Wife of Bath, the Cloud-author. Poem XVI. is more or less a reworking of Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses. Hopefully such things are not determinative though—they are more like easter eggs, idiosyncratic responses to texts tangential to this one.

 

I was really moved by the note in your acknowledgements thanking your cohort at the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program. I think that it is so inspiring and wonderful that your thesis manuscript has deeply impacted so many people. In what ways did community impact and inform your craft practice and your process of creating the manuscript?

 

There are many who deserve thanks, and, more than thanks, compensation, and even more who, passed on, are beyond compensation (when two trans women gather, how many dead in their midst). The debt I owe is infinite to them, and to my comrades, friends, colleagues, writers. Yes, many are the nights one walks home alone only to be followed—and, yes, a minimum resistance perhaps, but how precious when a friend offers to walk beside you, give you a ride—and I’m being literal here—that frees the space, time, mentally and physically and actually, to write a poem. It is the people who did these things, more than someone leaving a comment here or there in workshop (though, at times, these were the same people), whom I owe feeld to. Such people know who they are, but I wanted to include them within the book as well because they are an explicit part of its production.

 

What about poetry to you makes it the preferred medium to combine subject matter as you do so seamlessly in this book?
 

Pleasure is the whole thing. It’s pleasant to hear and read and write. There are light, pleasant, silly things in feeld to me. The line “if u dont hav 35 enemies yet / lorde / ur a dicke” recurs often in my head. It’s hyperbolic, but, has there even been a good person who wasn’t hated, deathly, by at least 35 people? It seems nigh impossible to be otherwise. But, I get, yes, there are ugly things in feeld too. If there is one overriding ugly anxiety surrounding the text, for me, it is the question, “why has it been so pleasurable, for so long, for cis people to kill trans people?”

An aside: I use ‘trans people’ here for lack of a better (transhistorical, transcultural) term—I mean what was at different times and places different names—not only effeminates, gender inverts, hermaphrodites, androgynes, and the countless other names given in Europe and the US, but too the names we have given ourselves, some mine to speak of here, some not, many lost. One would be remiss, too, not to mention ‘trans people’ as such, today, aren’t targeted as much as black trans women. In wont of more robust research, see 2015 US Transgender Survey, AVP, or numerous articles tallying reported murders. It is worth noting however that among the many gaps in the above research—not through fault of the researchers per se—is how such data is reported. For instance, not only are suicide statistics compounded often separately and/or via survey, but murders of trans people are only legible as reported by the cops. Thus not only is there a clear bias to skew the data by those reporting it, but further, any data on police antagonism to trans people, particularly, again, black trans women, is difficult to quantify other than anecdotally and ideologically. Thus, for instance, trans people who are murdered yet not reported as trans, trans people murdered under contexts not reported as murder (i.e. when involving sex work), suicides that are tantamount to murder, and so on, are absent from such research.